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Silent Hill moves into the surreal

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 13 / 14
Date: September 14, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Silent Hill 4: The Room is the most unusual entry in a most unusual video game franchise. While earlier installments in the series have focused on stories designed to evoke spine-chilling horror, this fourth chapter in the saga causes much deeper feelings of anxiety and unease. I remember being more traditionally scared playing Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams, but the underlying, more psychological sensation of existential dread I felt playing this game was something altogether new.

The Silent Hill games have shown a narrative progression by which the nature of the town is expanded upon in each game. In the first two games, your character went to Silent Hill and had his horrific adventure. In the third, Silent Hill itself "came to" the main character of Heather, who merely wanted to have a nice day at the mall. In Silent Hill 4, the town has now invaded your last refuge of security, your home.

You play Henry Townshend, who lives alone in a small apartment in the bustling town of South Ashfield, half a day's drive from Silent Hill. After suffering from inexplicable nightmares, Harry awakens to find that his apartment door has been chained and padlocked shut from the INSIDE. He can't open his windows, and no one, even people standing directly outside his front door, can hear him when he pounds on the door and cries for help.

The game expertly evokes the desperate confusion and lurking fear you would feel if you simply couldn't get out of your house. The strangeness of Henry's situation is underscored by the fact that, tantalizingly, he can see the real world right outside his window, with cars and pedestrians zipping by on a street only fifty yards away. Neighbors in the apartment building opposite his can be seen going about their business (one guy, amusingly, is playing air guitar). The banality of day to day life takes on a whole new meaning when one person is suddenly set apart from it by horrific circumstances he can't understand or control. The next time you're taking a walk down the block, imagine if something terrifyingly Silent Hill-ish was happening to someone in the very house you're walking past, and you're safe outside with no way of knowing. The whole character of the neighborhood will change. That's the kind of thing the Silent Hill series does so well: conveying the deep terror that can result when what is normal and commonplace suddenly and without warning goes all WRONG.

The action begins when Henry discovers that a large hole has emerged in his bathroom wall. As it's the only way out, he must crawl through it, and doing so, finds himself in the decaying, blood-spattered environments of Silent Hill with which the series' fans have become so familiar. But this game offers alarming differences. Some of the creatures that menace you -- like the ghosts that look more like floating paralyzed corpses -- can't be killed, and others -- like the two-headed babies that walk on adult arms -- are so bizarre they beggar imagination. You're also limited in what you can carry, and the only place you can save your game is in your apartment, a safe haven you can return to through holes in walls spread throughout the levels. But even that safe haven isn't safe for long.

In earlier games, the horror, while nightmarish, was still rooted in a sense of realism that, in turn, created realistic horror. You'd walk down dark corridors or misty deserted streets armed with a flashlight and your weapon. But here, the environments are more outrageously surreal, as if you're literally wandering through a bad dream. Spiral staircases seem to float in thin air. A enormous woman's face peers at you from a hospital wall. Living tendrils of no discernible biology dangle upwards from the floor to bar your way. Wheelchairs zoom down corridors by themselves, as if it were a freeway for paraplegic ghosts. It's as if the game designers just decided to let Salvador Dali loose with 3D rendering software and instructions that he was to exercise no restraint at all in coming up with ways to freak people out.

Sometimes it gets a little TOO weird. At times I found myself less frightened by this game than morbidly intrigued; I was actually interested in getting to certain rooms just to see what kind of crazy thing I'd encounter next. In that sense, I'd have to say the earlier games work a little better as pure, edge of your seat, bloodcurdling horror. But Silent Hill 4 still does a bang-up job of generating an entirely different kind of fear, one that doesn't so much leap out at you from the dark as crawl deep into the back of your mind and lurk there.

I leave you with two pieces of advice. One: if you're new to the series, don't start here, start with 2 and 3. Two: don't take the doll.

Stepping Backwards

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 13 / 16
Date: September 15, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Ok, so I could not believe in the bad press until I played through this game myself. This is the first SH game I didn't really enjoy. There is so much that is just wrong with it that it starts to overtake that which is new or innovative. Basically you play through 5 generic levels.......then you get to struggle through the same identical 5 levels with a limping companion who gets injured easily and who gravitates into conflicts with invincible enemies (I am not kidding). Some of the monsters/ghosts are creepy the first time you see them (which is saying something seeing how you don't encounter them in the dark with a flashlight) but lack the originality of SH2 or SH3 and have seemingly nothing to do with the storyline. The story is a re-hash of "Seven" morphed with "Nightmare on Elm Street" with a main villain who is about as scary as some trendy 20-something actor playing a serial killer in any boring 20-something neo-horror flick (not to mention Henry). Your room is an interesting and engaging concept but doesn't equate to what the spralling town of Silent Hill did for SH1 & SH2. Lastly, there is the soundtrack. Whoever thought to put a weak neo-metal ballad vocalist and a Peter Murphy wanna-be singing the lamest lyrics ever over the soundtrack needs to seriously explore another direction. On the SH3 soundtrack it was annoying and embarrassing, now it just sucks. Konami needs to put "quality" back into this series (no repeating levels, no RE item system) and seriously reconsider the nuances between scary and annoying game play.

Same Creepy Atmosphere, Same Lack Of Real Fright

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 12
Date: December 30, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This is a good effort on the part of Konami. They thought to spice things up a bit by including a forced first-person view mode for key moments in the game. Unfortunately it's not used to maximum effect. Ultimately Silent Hill 4 only offers more of the same, and that's disappointing to those of us used to it.

With the available subject matter you'd think Konami would put together a more chilling experience. Instead we're treated to the same visually compelling yet fright-limited gameplay the last Silent Hills offered. This series is known for it's creepy atmosphere. That's good, but a great survival-horror game combines atmosphere with frightful action, and that's where Silent Hill slips up. I can only recall one experience in Silent Hill 4 which really sent shivers up my spine, and nothing actually happened in it! Too often does the game make you think something terrifying is about to happen but doesn't. Expecting a sudden, monstrous noise in the background to scare players doesn't cut it anymore.

The storyline in these games has always been an issue for me. The plot, while interesting, just doesn't seem to congeal well as you progress through the game. The other Silent Hills also suffered from this. Any game that requires you to search the internet for a better understanding of it's storyline has problems. And what's with the difficulty in seeing multiple endings this time? Two of the four possible endings require keeping your partner character healthy throughout the entire time she's with you...an extremely frustrating task. I never had so much trouble viewing all the endings to a Silent Hill game.

With all that being said, I had a good time playing Silent Hill 4. I liked the voice acting, the first-person viewing mode, and the few changes they made to the play style. I just wish Konami would tweak the series' weaknesses to give us players a more terrifying experience. Then we'd have a perfectly gruesome, mature horror game.

The Room: most innovated SH game yet.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: September 13, 2004
Author: Amazon User

For some fans of the series, this game will come to be a shock when you find out that there are two view points in this game, 1st and 3rd person. You see when your in The Room you have to be in 1st person for some odd reason but the only thing that bothered me about this setup was trying to get used to the somewhat clunky control scheme used there. Sometimes you might need to look at a certain thing, let's say looking out the window, well sometimes you'll get this message that says "I haven't been able to open the windows in 5 days..." when I was trying to look at the main glass part of the window.

Sometimes this 1st person can be a problem, but I started getting used to it and most of the problems stopped.

As for gameplay, it's your normal SH game but they've added some new features. Like you can only change weapons by using the D-pad in real time, meaning if you run out of ammo in the middle of the battle you can't pause it to save you so you have to plan ahead and bring melee weapons.

Also you iventory is no longer limitless, you have to return to your room and deposit your unneccessary objects in a chest, kind of like the boxes in RE.

They've added a special ability mode too where you hold down the A button while in combat position and wait for a bar to fill up, once it's full you unleash an attack that can either be more devastating or can hit more enemies.

The storyline of the game is great and has little tidbits from the other 3 games (which can easily missed so look carefully) but other than that this game is like the 2nd where it has no connection to the main storyline of the characters from the 1st and 3rd (want to know their names and plots? Well go buy the games and play them to learn the secrets of the cult based in the town).

The graphics in this game aren't bad some of the creatures in this game are creepy, and they've added ghosts, which cannot be harmed by normal weapons and are kinda like the Nemesis from RE3.

Buy this game if you like the series or if you like the whole survival horror genre.

Come On Eileen...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: April 04, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I had some major high hopes for the latest in the Silent Hill franchise, it sounded great, and after watching the truly chilling pre-title sequence to the game, I cranked up the surround sound, and dived in.. And overall I have to say that I was really disappointed.

Silent Hill 4 continues in effectively the same tradition as the previous installments. A third person action/adventure game using the same fixed angle cameras, grainy filtering, and a bizzarrely unsettling collection of characters creatures and demons. It centres around a guy called Henry, who awakes in his appartment one day to find it totally sealed up from the inside, a note painted in blood on the inside warning him not to go out, and after some poking around discovers a small hole in the bathroom, which takes him to strange alternate worlds beset with ghosts, demons and curiouslyt interwoven with reality. Henry soon finds himself embroiled in the work of a serial killer, somehow related to his own appartment, and must battle to uncover the truth about Walter, and set himself free from the room.

The big plus point really is the inclusion of the first person section in the room itself, and the sometimes unsettling use of the peepholes, sounds, and other effects in the appertment. In fact I would say that all of the decent scares actually come from this mode. The actual main game itself was very disappointing. It plays exactly the same as it's predecessors, but whilst the story is engaging, the monotany of getting from one part to another really starts to take it's toll. Essentially from start to finish, the game is nothing more than a collect-these-objects-and-put-them-here type of game, which is pushed along by the insultingly horrible device of people leaving reams of notes and diary entries everywhere which act as nothing more than a list of instructions for you to carry out. That said, the hard difficulty level offers you less help in this way, but there are no Silent Hill 3 style sliders to adjust the difficulty of the arcade sections, so the game becomes very difficult in all regards.

Also and probably more importantly, the Room just isn't really that scary. After a very short while, I just found myself plodding on through it like a normal third person game, it just didn't manage to evoke that same sense of foreboding as previous games that would make you tread slowly, spin round at strange noises, and have you totally on edge at what was lurking in the darkness. The creatures were a let down too on the whole, just seemed nowhere near as inventive or downright disturbing as previous games, although the ghost victims were great and offered an extra dimension to the gameplay.

But probably, above all, the most criminal thing about Silent Hill 4 is the fact that it re-uses every single location that you travel to in the other realm. So you basically end up trudging round the same place two completely different times with different aims, where only a handful of things have changed. This was a dreadful move on the part of the developers. After spending an hour or so exploring the prison world, reading notes, and working your way out of it, the last thing I wanted to do was have to do it all over again in a very sligtly different way a few levels later - it absolutely ripped the soul out of the game.

So who is Silent Hill going to appeal to? Well definitely to hardcore fans of the series, or the survival horror genre in general. Also, the story is strong, and intruiging enough to keep you going - if you're interested in the unravelling of a mystery, it'll also not let you down. But if you love Silent Hill for the scares, creepiness and atmosphere, I wouldn't recommend this particular one in the series, because it falls way short. Also it is really not gonna appeal to you if you're more interested in the adventure side of action/adventure because there are simply no puzzles to solve in this game - merely things to collect, and places to stick them. To people wanting the ultimate Silent Hill experience, Silent Hill 2 is by far and away the best of the series. I don't know if they are going to do a fifth in the series, but if they do I hope that they learn from the mistakes of the Room.

Yawn...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: November 24, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Silent Hill has always been about intriguing stories, horrific monsters, and disturbing imagery similar to Jacob's Ladder, the film that arguably inspired the series. Silent Hill 1 may have had some issues as far as control style, but revolutionized the Survival Horror Genre which was already getting stale at the time of it's release as we had been bombarded with director's cuts of director's cuts of director's cuts of various Resident Evil games. It was the first game ever to succeed in forcing me to sleep with the light on. SH 2 wasn't quite as scary, but was still creepy, and disturbing, and had a great story to back it up. Silent Hill 3 was utterly terrifying, albeit short. And so now we have Silent Hill 4...
The puzzles are uninspired, the monsters look like something out of a coloring book and are scarce, and don't leave me feeling threatened, or frightened. The storage box thing really makes me mad. Its something we all hate about Resident Evil, so why did Konami adapt it? Not only that but you cannot stack items. (Combining two boxes of bullets into one, in example). The save system requires you to retreat back to your room for the only save spot in the game.
In your room you're supposed to be able to spy on the girl next door (whose hardly home, or when she is just sits on her bed staring into space) not much that's noteworthy occurs gazing out of your peephole either.
It's also of note that boss battles are few and far between, and with as easy as these monsters go down, one could say non-existent. I never got killed at all playing through this game.
Although the story is very good the game itself is not. The game is so easy that it borders on boring. There's nothing intense or scary about this title either. This would have made a better Japanese horror flick, as the story is superb, but it's just not that scary. Even my wife has been able to watch this, and she cringes at the thought of previous Silent Hills (which also gave her nightmares, and she is not a horror fan). Were it not for the story I would have quit this one long ago.
Graphically the game is a mixed bag. Textures look good; polygon models are not as good as SH3. There's a lot of aliasing, even on the Xbox version, and there is no progressive scan or wide screen support, an absolute must for my TV, especially since my Xbox has locked itself in a progressive scan signal, which won't allow my TV's zoom functions to work while the Xbox is playing games. (I can adjust movies just fine though.) The game therefore is stretched across my TV screen making characters look unnaturally fat. Had Konami implemented some kind of Wide screen support this wouldn't look as bad. Xbox is by far the most capable of such a feature, why not spend the extra few $$ to get this done so that the presentation can at least look good?
I was actually looking more forward to SH 4 than Resident Evil 4 as I personally have felt in the past the SH had more artistic intrigue than RE. Now I find their roles reversed, having played the demo for RE 4, and having played through SH 4's dull monsters, lame puzzles, and idiotic save and item management system I wish I had just saved my money. I am now worried that Silent Hill 5 could continue this trend of fixing things that weren't broken, and making the series worse. Only play this one for the story (which is very good). You may want to consider just renting this one though.

Just what I would expect

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: September 18, 2004
Author: Amazon User

After finally figuring out the problem I was having with the game and being able to FINALLY play it I have to say I like it.

I been with Silent Hill since the beginning on the Playstatin and it's just what I would expect.

The first person is only while in your room so it's okay. I'm not a fan of first person but this doesn't bother me. What sucks though is that I read in an interview that the new SH's may be strickly first person... If that becomes true then this will be my last SH. So I'm hoping it's not!

Aside from that, the game is Silent Hill. It's scarey and intriguing, just as the previous SH games. But still has the poor combat which doesn't bother me as I play it more for the uncovering the story rather then combat.

New to SH is the sense of urgency. Unlike the previous SH games this one creates a sense of urgency. Between the sounds, monster-things and the storyline itself... Instead of taking your time and exploring every cornor of an area you're sort of rushing through, creating more of a sense of realism. And this rush is enforced through the new monsters which are unkillable and follow you around. You can also see them follow you through the wall... Scarey!

I really enjoy the game. And am surprised they were able to create that urgency. I've never played a game before that was able to rush me through it.

It has to be said....

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: March 05, 2005
Author: Amazon User

It's obvious that many people writing reviews haven't played much of the game. To say nothing noteworthy happens when you spy on the girl next door or out of your peephole proves this. I first felt that this game was rubbish as well, until I finish the first two "levels". The game playes out like a movie in the sense that the first couple of "levels" gives you a foundation for the plot and how the game works. After that the game does indeed get very frightening, but more so disturbing in my view. It just keeps building and building. But you have to stick with it...don't expect it to get really interesting as soon as it starts.
The downsides of the game...1) it's starts off slow..which seems to be the cause of most of the negative reviews. stick with it though.2) for some it will seem very repetitive. It is..but it makes sense to the storyline. Still some people won't like this. 3) It gets really frustrating towards the end.

--- to people writing reviews..If you haven't gotten very far in the game..don't write one until you really know what you're talking about. You're giving false information because of it. Stop.

Silent Hill?

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: July 24, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I am a tremendous Survival Fan, I own even the lesser known titles such as Over Blood and the Ring. Silent Hill is one of my all time favorites, I was hooked from the first title. Silent Hill has a surreal and over all creepy atmosphere to it. There is often darkness, fog and decay in their stories. I have loved 1, 2 and 3. I had my hopes pretty high for Silent Hill 4. Unfortunately those hopes were wasted.

This game would have been fun if it was apart of the Silent Hill Franchise, but the moment they slapped that label on that game they basically rose the bar too high. Silent Hill 4 is dull and just not very interesting. It had some nice effects, some interesting characters and that is about it. The Monsters aren't even remotely interesting in this installment. They had evil monkeys for god sake!

The Ghost were kind of nice, but this isn't Silent Hill. It wasn't even very difficult but I made it nearly to the end, lost interest just out of pure and utter boredom and stopped for months before wanting to finish. I never did that with any other Silent Hill title. This was a most unfortunate sequal.

Don't waste your money!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: October 25, 2005
Author: Amazon User

[...]
Being an avid fan of the survival horror genre, I naturally bought this title. I ended up throwing it out a few days later. The only thing I really liked about the game was its first-person perspective.
You begin in an eerie, locked apartment room. Soon you discover what is essentially a portal to a haunted subway system in the bathroom. Sounds engaging, right? It is, thus far. Upon entering, the first thing I noticed here were the bothersome ghosts. You can attack them only to discover that they, being ghosts, cannot be "killed," thus you're stuck with them, following you, trying to suck the life out of your every other second. After circumventing these, I decended into the main subway area only to encounter more. Now they were hampering my mobility. Whenever I tried to pass or traverse any other area of the subway, I encountered them. It was annoying. At least allow me to investigate my surroundings! I played for about 20 minutes longer like this before I shut off my PS2 and took out the game. This is the kind of game that, because of it's difficulty level, makes you frustrated enough to stop playing it.
If you want to enjoy the SH series, I recommended trying to find SH2 (I found it used at Blockbuster) or even SH3. As for survival horror, I highly recommend Fatal Frame 2 (there's also a FF3 coming out 11/05) or Resident Evil 4.

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